Put simply, Henry Dorling did not think that Samuel Orchart Beeton was good enough for his eldest stepdaughter, whom he regarded as his own flesh and blood. Beneath this judgement lay a fair degree of self-loathing. Sam, like Henry, was an energetic eldest son who had started out in printing before quickly spotting the potential in adjacent pursuits (racing in Henry’s case, book publishing in Sam’s). Both men were sharp, bright, keen self-publicists who knew how to make money. This meant they should have liked one another, were it not for the fact that the prime dynamic of the rising middle classes involved not looking back. Henry had not worked hard, improved his situation, and spent all that money on turning his eldest stepdaughter into a lady in order for her to marry a man who seemed and sounded like himself. His own two eldest girls, Isabella’s near contemporaries Jane and Mary, would eventually marry a lawyer and doctor respectively. A son-in-law belonging to one of the gentlemanly professions was the kind of return Henry expected on his investment, and it looked as though Bella was going to throw it – herself – away.
And then there was Sam’s rackety family. His sisters, who went to school with the Dorling girls in Heidelberg, were nice enough, but there was something raffish about the male members of the Beeton clan. Throughout the period various Beetons had a nasty habit of popping up in the Law Court reports. There is Thomas Beeton, Sam’s uncle and lodger at the Dolphin, who in 1834 is charged with making impertinent remarks to women in the street. In the next generation down things were no more promising. Sam’s younger half-brother Edward Albert would, while still in his teens, be charged with insurance fraud, go bankrupt, flee the country, and eventually serve eighteen months’ hard labour. A quick flick through The Times shows other members of the extended Beeton tribe regularly coming up on charges of arson, careless driving, and a clutch of other minor but unpleasant crimes. Significantly, one of the few times a Dorling is mentioned in the newspaper in a less than benign tone is in 1864 when Sam Beeton went into partnership with Isabella’s stepbrother Edward Dorling and managed to drag him into a bad-tempered property dispute that ended, typically, in court. Whichever way you looked at it, the Beetons were not the kind of people you would rush to call family.
So Henry and Sam embarked upon an uneasy Oedipal relationship in which the elder man could never resist a dig at the younger, and the younger could never quite throw off his need to impress and surpass the elder. During the end part of 1855 Sam, nearly always writing from his hectic office in Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street, had been sending his letters to Isabella in envelopes that were stamped with the logo of his newest venture, the Boy’s Own Journal, a companion weekly title to the well-established monthly Boy’s Own Magazine. Henry hated this vulgarism – he was already worried that the smarter part of Epsom did not consider him quite a gentleman – and insisted that it stop forthwith. In a letter of 3 January 1856 Isabella writes to Sam nervously: ‘I hope you will not be offended with me for sending you a few envelopes. Father said this morning he supposed your passion for advertising was such that you could not resist sending those stamped affairs.’ This, surely, was rather rich coming from a man who had worked hard to make sure that the name ‘Dorling’ appeared on every poster, pamphlet, and local newspaper circulating in Epsom.
Still, Sam continued to yearn for Dorling’s approval while pretending that he did not. In June 1856 he nonchalantly sends Isabella a copy of the brand-new Boy’s Own Journal hot off the press so that she could ‘show the guv’nor so that it may receive his approbation or thunders’. In the run-up to the spring races in 1856 he dutifully intones, ‘I hope your father will have a good meeting next week,’ before making sure that he isn’t available to watch Henry play the Great Man of Epsom. Sam is careful, too, to feign an unconvincing indifference to the whole horsey world. In a postscript to a letter of 10 April 1856, written a week later, Isabella explains, ‘I would have sent you a return List but I know you don’t care about racing.’
It was not even as if, by way of compensation for his rough edges, Sam was a wealthy man. Henry Dorling, whose fondness for money-making was beginning to attract jealous talk, would have noticed the way in which the small fortune Sam had made from the lucky strike of Uncle Tom had been frittered away in the debacle of The Key. And then there was the unfortunate fact that while Sam’s magazines, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and the Boy’s Own Magazine, appeared to be selling well, this was partly because their publisher was giving away a huge number of loyalty prizes in the form of glitzy trinkets – watches, bracelets, penknives and even pianos. If Dorling was worried that he might be handing over his girl to a man with no money, then the events of February 1856 only confirmed his worst suspicions. For it was now that Sam got himself into some kind of muddle with his lottery arrangements, which meant that he forfeited a colossal £200 a year, about half his annual income. This must have led to some very heated discussions in the drawing room of Ormond House, for by the middle of the month Isabella is writing consolingly to her fiancé, ‘I am sorry to hear you are not likely to get out of your Lottery mess nicely … However, I don’t believe things will be so bad as many people try to make out; as long as you have a head on your shoulders I think you will manage to scrape a living together somehow,’ which hardly sounds like a vote of confidence.
The tensions between the Dorling and Beeton clans would deepen with each year of the nine-year marriage as Sam’s recklessness and cockneyism became more and more apparent. In the early summer of 1855, however, the full extent of these pains lay far in the future, as the newly engaged Isabella and Sam delightedly contemplated each other and the life they would make together. Two images from this time, one of each of them, have come down to us (none has ever been found of them together). The first of these is the iconic photograph of Isabella that now belongs to the National Portrait Gallery. Taken in the London studios of Maull and Polybank, probably at their Cheapside branch, it shows a solemn, solid girl weighed down by the visual signifiers of early Victorian ladyhood. First there is the poker-straight, heavy hair wound into a plaited coronet, so big and tight that it looks as if she is wearing a particularly unbecoming hat (minute inspection reveals that a sturdy chenille net is keeping the whole thing steady). Then there is the dress, made locally in Epsom out of a length of silk given to her by Ralph Sherwood, the Epsom trainer, in celebration of the fact that his horse Wild Dayrell had won the highly dramatic Derby of that year. Patterned with broad bands of colour, pinched into horizontal tucks, and decorated with fussy buttons, the whole thing looks as if it would be better suited to a sofa. The effect is finished with full lace sleeves and collar, a silk shawl edged with heraldic-looking velvet scutcheons, a faceted glass brooch and fancy wristwatch. As a final touch Isabella clutches at a voluminous handkerchief with one hand while with the other she points to her ample bust. She is 20 years old, trussed up like a fussy matron, entirely innocent of the flair that she would display in a few years’ time as fashion editor of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. A photograph taken of her when she was about 24 shows her from this later period, which was how her sisters always chose to remember her: slender, elegant, emphatically unpatterned, with just one striking row of jet beads and not a brooch or handkerchief in sight.
The surviving image of Sam from 1853, two years before the engagement, is a head and shoulders chalk drawing by Julian Portch, a well-known artist who had sketched many young men in Sam’s circle. In the sketch, Portch presents Sam as a romantic hero. His face is long, his eyes large and lingering, his mouth pronounced and sensuous (although we must beware of crude face-mapping – all the Beetons had that mouth and some of them, the women especially, lived blameless lives). The hair is wavy and longish, the necktie soft, large, and careless. This is a young man who likes to think of himself as a rebel, impatient with the ponderous respectability of his elders (significantly he has no beard). If Shelley had been reborn as a Cheapside publican’s son he might have looked a lot like Sam Beeton. A second photograph, taken when Sam was 29, shows little change. There is a light beard and moustache now (he had problems growing a full one), but the general effect is the same. The clothes are self-consciously ‘bohemian’ and the necktie appears to be identical to the one from his youth